The human brain has long fascinated me. Between my undergrad psychology courses and the graduate-level neuroanatomy and neuropathology courses I took in my program, I learned a lot about the brain. A theory I had learned back then came to mind when I asked myself these tough questions about God: confirmation bias, our tendency to seek out information to fit what we already believe. It turns out humans have a strong compulsion to force new information to fit with what we already believe rather than being objective, quizzical, and open to changing our beliefs. We don’t ever want to admit that we were wrong or made a bad choice, so we take any information that damages our viewpoints and rationalize it away, much like I did while fighting against evolution in high school: I purposely sought out information that would fit what I wanted to believe while ignoring information contrary to what I wanted to hear.
Humans ignore or re-frame information that doesn’t fit our world view in a way that is beyond our conscious awareness. Imagine someone you dislike doing something considerate or kind for you. You might assume that they had a selfish reason or ulterior motive for acting that way before you believe that they are capable of general kindness. Or you may barely notice their kindness while your brain latches on to every instance of them behaving rudely or selfishly to maintain cognitive harmony with your negative opinion of their character. In contrast, a beloved friend who disappoints you will likely get a pass while you rationalize that they might be having a hard day but are certainly not a bad person.
On a grander scale, if you are a person who is worried about the climate (as I am) and want human societies to do more to curb our carbon emissions, you might latch onto every news story about adverse weather events and believe that we have serious work to do to avoid certain doom (as I do). If you are someone who believes that the planet constantly cycles through warming and cooling periods and that human beings aren’t overly responsible for current changes in the environment, you might ignore certain stories and point out a cooler-than-average season as evidence against global warming. We routinely massage facts to make them say what we want them to say.
Had I been massaging the facts of reality to force God into the picture? Learning about God and dedicating my life to God, then seeing God’s hand at work in my life: was it reality or Confirmation Bias 101?
When I questioned the reality of God, I thought about “hindsight bias”—our tendency to act like we knew things would turn out the way they did in retrospect. If you invest in a risky stock and it ends up performing well, you might turn around and explain that you had a gut feeling that it was a good idea to invest in that particular stock. However, if the stock went sideways, you’d likely chalk it up to bad luck and not a bad judgment call on your behalf.
Whenever I got a raise or a relationship that had been on the rocks suddenly improved, I would typically think that my prayers paid off and God had blessed me (even though it was not God’s fault if the raise never came along). Similarly, we always see the winning sports team pointing up and thanking God after the game, but not the losing team players blaming God for their loss. We praise God if we get all green lights while running late to work but don’t think God is involved at all when we hit the normal number of reds and greens. Being religious and believing that God played an active role in the world, it was easy for me to assign credit to God after good things happened and to explain away negative events as one-offs or bad luck. I could look back in time at what had objectively, factually happened and only then decide what that meant.
For example, when I moved to Spokane after graduate school, I quickly joined an online dating website. I wasn’t in a big rush to meet anyone, but a friend of mine was trying to get me to sign up, and I figured, “Why not?” It was free. Within an hour of uploading my profile, I was contacted by a local man. As I perused his profile, I saw that he attended a nearby church and even led a small group (a major turn-on for my little Christian self). He seemed interesting and charming enough in our chats, so we set up a coffee date. That man turned out to be my husband. Looking back, to me it felt like destiny, that God brought us together through the wide world of online dating shortly after I moved and became open to meeting someone. Meanwhile, from his perspective, he had been out of college for years with a history of several failed relationships and online dating profiles that went ignored for months. He was aimlessly waiting for years for me to show up. He likes to joke that I was his mail-order bride flown in from the exotic Midwest. Hardly the romantic story of fate that I experienced. As my experience goes to show, we want to see greater meaning and purpose even when it does not exist. The brain will force facts to fit these subconscious motivations of ours without us even realizing that we are deluding ourselves.
Many of these mental shortcuts and biases make the world easier to understand. The environment we live in is large and complex, and the behavior of other people is hard to predict and even harder to control. Our brain is always striving for maximum efficiency, never wasting energy where it isn’t crucial to do so. We rely on shortcuts and schemas to give our brains a break, but these are not always accurate. We tend to think of our brains as these supercomputers that control our every thought and function and that objectively take in data through which we can understand the world. Unfortunately, our brains are as human as the rest of us. They fall victim to faulty logic and make mistakes.
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The brain’s gullibility became clearer to me the more I learned about chronic pain from my profession. The bulk of my career thus far has been spent in the outpatient orthopedic world. Most of the time my patients come in for pain of one type or another: back pain, knee pain, ankle sprains, torn ligaments, inflamed tendons—I’ve spent the last twelve years treating pain. Acute pain directly resulting from a tissue injury in a well-established time frame is easy enough to treat. Chronic or persistent pain, however, is an entirely different monster.
Pain is the alarm system of our body, warning us of danger; it is the only means our brain has of communicating this warning to us. Imagine that you put your hand too close to the hot stove. Your temperature-sensing nerves send a signal to the brain, and the brain recognizes the threat and causes you to feel pain so that you’ll move your hand. Threat managed—the pain goes away.
Persistent pain happens when the brain can’t get out of “threat” mode for any reason. Perhaps the original source of pain was traumatic due to abuse or a serious accident, or maybe you were raised with parents who freaked out over every little scratch, or your personal or cultural belief may be that all pain is disastrous and a sign of something seriously wrong. In persistent pain, your brain can latch onto pain like a bad song getting stuck in your head. That song distracts you and can stop other parts of the brain from working properly, affecting your physical being as well as your emotional and mental health, your sleep, your concentration, and even entire systems like the immune system or reproductive system!
An old assumption initially proposed by René Descartes over 400 years ago that lingers in the medical world to this day is that tissue damage—a torn muscle, frayed tendon, arthritic joint, or bulging disc—directly causes pain and that the amount of damage determines how severe the pain would be. This is simply not the case as proven again and again through research. Researchers have taken MRIs of people who are not complaining of shoulder pain and have found that one out of three people over the age of thirty has rotator cuff damage and no pain to show for it. Over the age of seventy that number goes up to two out of three people with rotator cuff tears who have no pain. There are similar statistics for neck and back arthritis, hip joints, knee joints, and bulging discs. There are people in this world walking around with bone-on-bone arthritis in their knees and absolutely no knee pain.
I can certainly attest to this anecdotally from what I’ve witnessed at work. I am usually able to review my patients’ medical charts, including any imaging reports, before seeing them for their initial evaluation. Countless times there has been a patient I’d review and begin to dread treating because their imaging reports were so nasty. People whom I expected to hobble in grimacing and groaning would come strolling up to my clinic with only mild complaints and get resolution quickly with treatment. Others whom I incorrectly assumed would be a breeze to treat since their reports looked mild or completely normal would turn out to have intractable pain that remained debilitating despite all my best attempts to alleviate it.
What we have learned in modern times through studying the body and the brain is that torn, bruised, or broken tissues do not directly produce pain. Rather, the body simply sends data to the brain for the brain to process. The data itself is neutral. Our brains take it in and decide what value to assign it depending on a wide variety of factors. It works the same way with all our senses. Our eyeballs don’t do the seeing; they send visual information to the brain where it gets processed, and our brains can be tricked, as optical illusions demonstrate so well. Likewise, our ears don’t themselves hear but rather send sound waves to the brain for interpretation. Our brain can be tricked here as well as demonstrated by auditory illusions. There are neat videos on YouTube that demonstrate these illusions if you're curious, or you can watch the entertaining National Geographic show “Brain Games.”
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The brain is not as objective and accurate as we would like to believe, even when it comes to the physical sensations it causes us to feel in our bodies. The brain is influenced by context, past experiences, our culture, our mood, and a wide variety of factors at any given moment. I would go so far as to say that our brains—even among the most intelligent and objective of us—are gullible.
Knowing how gullible my own brain was, how prone to shortcuts and biases that may or may not reflect reality, I wondered how much of my faith made real sense and how much I simply wanted it to make sense. Did I see everything through God-colored glasses only because that was how I was raised and how my brain was trained to interpret the world? My brain might have been convinced of the presence of a loving, all-knowing Higher Being, that didn’t seem to be a good indicator of objective reality.
I was scared to truly question the existence of God. Most of my closest friends are progressive Christians who are also critical of literal readings of the Bible, believe in science, and affirm all people’s identities, but they don’t seem to have the same issue I had regarding the whole big picture. My husband was on the same page as myself up until the point when I questioned God’s existence. Was I being led astray? Was I off-base? Was I the only one feeling this way?
Talking over the dull roar of our kids playing or late at night while lying in bed, my husband and I reasoned through this together. While we shared many of the same thoughts and opinions, he was not as quick to question the literal existence of God as I was. He was equally critical of the church, equally appreciative of the cultural context and nuance needed to get a fair reading of the Bible, equally convinced by the facts of science, but he found he was still able to believe in an adjusted idea of God. He admitted that he almost doesn’t care if God is real or not, but he appreciates having God to believe in to govern and order his life.
I could appreciate that. Maybe God was as real as traffic laws—not a fundamental part of the universe but necessary just the same. I know I am unusual in how much I think about all this, and certainly not everyone else cares this much. But I have always valued authenticity and genuineness above all else, so I needed to know if God was an actual, real thing or not. I needed to know that there was a bedrock truth to the existence of God to be able to keep believing.
I found that the more I learned—about biology, psychology, paleoanthropology, Church history, the brain, the Bible—the more it caused a new picture to form in my mind, a picture that did not include a Divine Creator. My questions and doubts were leading me down to the most foundational beliefs a person can have. I felt truly nervous now, knowing that I was heading toward what felt more and more like an inevitable leap that would take me far away from the culture and worldview of my family and friends.
Adapted as an excerpt from "Giving up God: Ressurecting a Spirituality of Love and Wonder" by Sarah Henn Hayward. Read more at https://www.lakedrivebooks.com/books/giving-up-god/
